Monday, April 21, 2008

An editorial on college-campus parking problems compares faculty and students to waiters and customers at a restaurant. If waiters park right in front of a restaurant, customers will not want to park at a distance and patronize the establishment. The context is different, the editorial acknowledges, but the roles of faculty and students, the editorial contends, are "close to the same."

Faculty : students :: waiters : customers?

That's the kind of analogy that develops when one begins to think of higher education as a matter of customer service. Is it worth pointing out the ways in which this analogy fails? I think so.

A campus building is not a customer destination, and a campus is by definition a pedestrian environment. One doesn't drive to class as one might drive to a restaurant. One drives to campus, and then gets around on foot (and perhaps by shuttle-bus). That a student should expect a space in front of a classroom building — a building that during any hour of the day might hold a thousand students — is silly (handicapped parking aside).

And parking aside, faculty are hardly comparable to waiters in their work. If we profs were waiters, we'd have a pretty strange restaurant, serving our specialties to diners who in many cases have no idea what's on the menu, though they've already paid for their meals.

comments: 2

This metaphor of "customer service" is a quite inappropriate one for higher education. It is part of a more general, and insidious, move to view all aspects of life through the lens of commercial enterprise.

A similar mistake is made when people try to talk about government as a business and citizens as customers. This misapplied metaphor leads to some terrible distortions of thought. The relationship of a citizen to a country is not equivalent to that of a customer to a business.

It is interesting - though sad- to see how this metaphor has become the dominant one of our time. When we give in to it, we shrink & distort our world.

C. W. Mills wrote a wonderful paper in 1940 in which he talks about this phenomenon ('Situated actions and vocabularies of motive').

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